Inventive concepts relate to systems-on-chips, and more particularly, to a system-on-chip using a dynamic voltage frequency scaling, and a method of operating the same.
The use of mobile devices such as smart phones, tablet PCs, digital cameras, MP3 players, PDAs, etc. has grown in recent years. The employment of a high speed processor and mass storage medium has increased corresponding to an increase in the drive of a multimedia device and data throughput in the mobile device. The mobile device may drive various application programs. To drive various application programs, semiconductor devices including a working memory (e.g., DRAM), a nonvolatile memory, and an application processor (AP) are used in the mobile device. A demand for high performance in a mobile environment drives an increase in the degree of integration and driving frequency of the semiconductor devices.
Accordingly, performance of a processing unit or a memory in a mobile device has been developed. However, a demand for high performance in a mobile environment makes efficiently managing power challenging. A processing speed or performance of a mobile device is being standardized. Thus, the study of a battery technology or an effective power management technology for providing continuous service time to a user in a mobile environment is actively being performed.
As part of an effective power management, a dynamic voltage frequency scaling (DVFS) method is used. Since the dynamic voltage frequency scaling (DVFS) method is limited to an operation shape of each intellectual property (IP) block, the DVFS method does not consider a data transmission rate of a data packet that requires a specific process.